Am heart driven by the plan to set up green get-togethers in every community small and large in our world, eventually to speak together and become “one.” We will share how to preserve and save and recover from the ways we have been destroying our environment. This includes chopping down all the trees which create the oxygen we breathe as well as the sea plankton which do the same, our unceasing, careless and unnecessary use of fossil fuels, and its myriad of detrimental effects, eating all the fish we don’t throw back dead, releasing foul pollutants into land and sky and water, losing topsoil to the winds of drought and the necessity for everyone to have a royal acre to create a lawn rather than preserve our relationship to Mother Earth while growing only necessary foo, giving wildlife, our brothers and sisters, a place to live.

What I want us to do is bring together people all doing the “green thing” locally and nationally, to get together and show each other our work so that we can share and do and sell and teach. The few people, the very few absorbing the entire riches of the globe, are unimaginably short-sighted since a terrible death awaits them too. No air to breath. No water to drink. No food to eat since nothing grows in such pollution. How can these one-percenters rise above this situation with a mountain of cash?

Please write me at elangolomb@gmail.com to become part of this wonderful way to share our power and wisdom, to learn and share and teach. It will be a wonderful experience of a growing bunch of friends. I feel my heart warming and expanding awaiting to hear from you.

Spoke to a friend about a comment I heard Jill Stein make about the scientific prediction that by the turn of the century half of all our animal life on earth will be extinct and we as part of this interdependent world will be gone.

She began scolding me in an excited, angry voice. Said that Jill Stein was part of a Russian conspiracy. She saw it on the internet. I responded that several US officials were at that same Putin attended dinner in Russia which did not place them in the conspiracy spotlight. Said her questioning the conspiracy of power leads those who “own it all” to discredit her. The news funded by these powerful owners is used to stealing power from rivals rather than alarm us into taking measures that concern survival.

Our current Republican government, and some Democrats too, with a corporate money fueled “burn it ” agenda do not reject Trump’s belief that Global Warming is a Chinese hoax. They say to look at the freezing weather affecting the east coast. They do not know that this arctic chill is associated with the arctic heat wave. The congress, so much funded by carbon mining and selling corporations, will not endorse the need to stop using these products. They do not consider that what is already in the air will create a world of flood and fire, a death of living things.

People need to get involved with environmental movements, NIMBY (not in my backyard) or organizations facing world demolition. People need to consider the coming food shortages as our burn-it-up philosophy leads to unavailability of food (and medicines). Importation of food will cease as fertile parts of the world turn into swamp or desert.

Join a group that raises a garden. Create a garden on your window sill. Have dehydrated stores of food for that just-in-case time. Have a store of water so that If there is a breakdown in electricity and the pumps don’t work. Have a solar collector on your window sill or get the now developing solar windows which just stick on the glass and gather energy night and day. To your energy collector you attach a battery and from them power your heating device, refrigerator, lamp, cell phone, radio.

Create a community in which people’s skills are shared. Retreat from membership in a society of 300 plus million in which the Federal Government determines whether we live or die. Create a family of man … and beast. Cut down to zero (or as close as you can) to eating animals. The way they are raised in factory farms is torture. The carbon footprint on meat is horrendous. Our bodies can thrive on veggies. Don’t fall for advertising trying to get you to buy buy buy new things to “support the economy.” Create an economy in which the money goes round and round with no rich cat walking off with most of it. Look at Mondragon, a self-sustaining huge interrelated economy in Spain started by a priest some 50 years ago. No inflation. No top and no bottom earners. No one moves out. And why would they?

Security on the job. Beauty of the surroundings sustained by a community that cares. Peace. Joy. Love.

We are carried away by the hubris of the politicians mad with power and lying to suppress our fear. Know that you are afraid that the destruction our country pours around the world has now come home to us. It is us who have to put on the brakes. We cannot do it individually but only as a mighty “we,” an “us,” “noi” in Italian, as Pope Francis just said it on HuffPost. See the speech. It’s wonderful.

I saw a polar bear struggling on the ice, falling, pulling itself up, then falling again and again, finally giving up and staying down. This was not characteristic of the species, a majestic animal that thrives in that environment, but man had made the bear weak. I wept and wept, thinking of the dying species—not because of some sort of natural selection, but because of our chemical waste, our need to extract from the land and use the land on which to spew pollutants (it costs money to extract them), because of our lack of caring for life. I cried some more.

I told a dear friend about my tears and he said that polar bears are the only animals that will kill humans simply for pleasure. I laughed with him but part of me felt how humor, and even facts, keep us away from feeling tragedy. People do it with dry facts, with marijuana and alcohol and mood-altering drugs, both legal and otherwise. Boy, are we ever prepared! This is a sarcastic remark. It means the opposite.

Perhaps the fact person and the drug taker would be overwhelmed by feeling. Perhaps our culture has taught us to feel ashamed of weeping or shouting. Shhhhh. Keep it in. But we need to fully feel. Feeling our pain, our terror, our loss, keeps us present and within the realm of reality.

For example, we need to know what our bombing is doing to the rest of the world—children with burned faces, eleven-year-olds working in factories or in mines. What has so long been denied, ignored, subverted by dry facts or humor, is increasingly happening to us.

Turn your eyes away. But blindness does not protect you. And how could using devices to keep us from feeling make anything better? It is childish, magical thinking. The psychopathic politicians use your fear to control you. They promise you protection while they covertly doom us all. They are greedy users who are making sure that they will have much more than enough. The more we are taught to feel ashamed of showing feeling, the more likely we will fall into their pit of robbery, disease, and death.

Know that bad is coming. See it. Feel it. And be prepared. Figure out alternative ways to maintain yourself (and your family if they are with you). The ability to feel the pain all around us is a sign of strength. Seeing reality for what it is keeps us from putting our faith in politicians who make false promises. It makes us self reliant. It helps us create extended families we call friends who will work collectively, share the pain, the joy and the fun of the job of creating change.

Their eyes, the eyes of those who have the power to decide, are on making more money now. Later doesn’t exist for them. Needing ever more money is a form of addiction. Their eyes are on making money from the ways that worked for them before, the ways they already are invested in. Change is expensive and therefore to be suppressed, ignored, minimized. The way that made America rich is based on extraction including extracting work from slaves. Take it, dig it, cut it out, net it, use all ways of taking, pay off (bribe)those who have the power to stop you including Congress people. The theme is take take take take take.

Using enormous nets, fish out all that lives in the ocean (discard the species you do not want. Think that the quantity of fish is endless. You have to think that to make your taking moral. Ignore reports of their dwindling and total extinction. Dig more coal. Clean coal as the President calls it. Ignorance united with greed shapes his speech. Dig for oil in national parks. Now they are going for parkland in the north where, a huge number of birds fly to propagate. Sell the parks or cut them way back to mine them and overcharge entry. People are seen as worthless eaters who soon will be replaced by AI. Put pipelines through Indian reservations. Ignore the endless leaking pipes carrying corrosive oil by pipes not built to handle it. Despoil areas that produce our food and water. Science will fix it, won’t it? When?

Hunt the biggest and oldest in the pack of caribou, bears, seals, elephants… the elders breed the strongest offspring, they lead the herd and train the young’uns. But they look good mounted on your wall. Ignore the potential power source of sun and wind and geothermal and tides. Arrest those who march against this, the tree sitters and tribes praying for water. Spray them with water in the freezing cold, tear gas them, shoot, maim and kill them. Run them over with your car or truck. Arrest those who make noises to scare away the game. Label them terrorists.

Remember the interdependence of life. Take down trees in the Amazon to grow short-lived grass to feed soon-to-be hamburger meat whose top soil soon blows away so you have-to move on. Cut more trees. No trees. No oxygen. Take away the money for medical care and education and park care and roads maintenance and railroads. Keep it for the 1 percent who never have enough. Stop funding birth control as the world population explodes and jobs disappear in an AI world.

Pretty soon you have raving and starving and sickly people in the streets and at your nation’s gates. Where are the rich and the rest of us going to hide when the world explodes with unmet needs?

We choose a president who chose a cabinet which is robbing us every single day of things which offer popular support – to give tax breaks to the obscenely rich or great profit to equally powerful corporations. Did we not know this when we voted?

I would say yes and no. We saw a scheming television personalty who promised not to take away Medicare, Medicaid, health care and on and on…. All of these now are on the chopping block. The TV stations went crazy for him because his appearance sold a lot of on-air products. They pretty much ignored everyone else, especially Bernie Sanders.

His reputation for not paying almost everyone who worked for him was not mentioned by mainstream media but seeped into the news elsewhere. Why did we choose to fall into the trip of deceit? Probably because we already were there. People most easily scammed were raised by parents who both terrified and took away their right to think for themselves. These child-minded adults saw the candidate as a powerful figure who could harm them. They chose to accept his words of self-glory as well as promises of help, jobs, etc. that he would not keep. The child within is too frightened of severe parental mistreatment to do otherwise.

But how are we who had a terrifying childhood and, as a consequence, a terrified inner child to move away from our submissive persona and become a free and and powerful self? That is what this column is about.

I set myself to thinking about people I’ve seen who live in the adult self. I remember going to a NY library to research documentary films because I was about to film one myself on the mothering practices in the Venezuelan Amazon. To my surprise there were few of them. I guess corporations that fund television do so to sell their toothpaste, bombs and bullets through adult educational programming. They are certainly not interested in a tiny bunch of people living off the land. I saw a pygmy family, beautiful small people sitting in an igloo of leaves and branches. It was the rainy season and it sure was raining. There seemed to be some complaining and pointing to the roof until Dad went out and got a few more leaves to cover the holes. Then he sat down next to Mom, next to their older boy child, a boy and a younger child leaning against them, and began to sing to to sing. Momma sang. Daddy sang. The older boy and the baby sang, mouth wide open, not yet quite using words. The melody was beautiful. The harmony even more so- not just the music, but the family itself. Everyone unselfconsciously joined together, entranced.

I then looked at another film of a small group of people, several families on an Indonesian Island. I heard from them that the children never fight. something we in the west call normal. These people gather food from nature around them including mussels in the stream. They leave no imprint on the world.

They too sang. They sometimes sang together, sometimes alone. Even a child would sometimes sing alone. They sang on camera and the tune was beautiful. They sang to celebrate life. They asked the embarrassed and cornered anthropologist to sing. He croaked out “Old McDonald…” They smiled and made happy noises as they were a kind bunch of people.

So this is the image I use for an adult self-singing together, all included. Any “leader” who shuts out certain singers as unworthy, evil, like the Muslims, African Americans, Latinos, are Jews, women, are not singing the song of self. The true self is inclusive. Martin Luther King Jr., made that point. To love all is not to like their aggressive and destructive deeds. A true self feels unity with the living planet which that person will not and cannot despoil.

So find a group in which you can sing your song. Your music needn’t be one of sound. It can be selling solar power, teaching creating. It can be inventing, writing poetry, preserving species, leading hikes. It can be anything in which your spirit sings, so long as you sing with everyone – a beautiful harmony of the human family; more than that, the family of life.

Political statements which support depriving middle and lower classes while holding onto wealth and power are repeated by the writing of corporate funded news. These stir up hatred by stating that one group steals the ever fewer jobs from the other. Those with their hands in the till (of our tax money and their investments) tell us that we are endangered by ….. Muslims, blacks, Jews, women, Indians trying to protect our water, …. anyone who wants to protect those with power from being accused and punished for their life destructive incursions.

The 1 percent goes up and the 99 percent goes down, down, down. Let us look at Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, who has zero experience, understanding and interest in public schools. She said that public education “is a poor investment.” Part of her family’s great wealth comes from collecting student loans. She stated that she wants to offer vouchers to poor people so that their children can go to the assumed superior charter schools. This stated intention is a scam. After receiving the voucher, poor people still cannot afford to send their child to a charter school so the child does not attend. Children in charter schools are there from the start because their parents have money to pay. Voucher money is taken from the public school kitty for the sole goal of impoverishing it. Look where the money goes when assigning responsibility.

The Trump group is talking about closing the Department of Education (i.e. public schools) in 2018. Education when effective, creates a thinking person. DeVos has stated her intention is to have the schools endorse religious principles. She called it God’s Kingdom, presumably a Christian enclave. Remember the separation of church and state? Now forget it. Such restricted schooling gets students to submit to the propaganda of millionaires and billionaires who enhance their wealth by getting rid of public services; to end Medicare and Medicaid; to privatize the Social Security they call an “entitlement, a misnomer which is a euphemism for a lie. Social Security is a lifetime investment taken from your “pay check”; Teachers increasingly “teach to the exam” which means suppressing thought. The controlling 1 percent has got its claws in creative teaching. Passing a test does not mean you can think.

We are inundated with the false understanding about what threaten us instead of how we are actually being robbed. Panicked by an imagined history, we ignore the threat of EOs (Executive Orders) one after the other. Recently an EO proposed to end the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) which reveals money-making environmental damage, the EO canceling the CPB (Committee for Public Broadcasting) which supports air time for small and public supported voices. Day after day, on and on and on. All the basic stuff of life is being turned into money. They are pulling up the sidewalks.

I was quite depressed and fearful last night, even of the consequences of my being noticed for writing this. Then I had this dream.

I saw a group of children, perhaps about 50 of them standing together and not of the “same” racial group. One of them did or was said to have said something negative against another. It was stated by the teacher as if being a criminal act. The teacher asked, “…who did it” to the crowd. Asked them to expose that child so that the others would get angry and attack. “Speak up. Talk. What is your reaction to this behavior?” But no one spoke. She tried to up the ante by characterizing the unknown child as “a bad one.” But still, there was no speech. The teacher could not stir up fear and hatred. She was defeated, silenced.

At the end of my dream, there was happiness in the children’s eyes. Also in my own eyes as I awakened. I felt the spirit of love shared by all the children. Love sustains life.